A Court Fight and a Tireless Battle Over an Image

Amanda Knox, at the Leonardo da Vinci airport in Fiumicino, near Rome, on Tuesday on her way home to Seattle.Credit
Ansa/Reuters

When Amanda Knox and her family landed home in Seattle on Tuesday, it was the culmination of an exhaustive four-year legal, lobbying and public relations effort that ultimately succeeded when an Italian court overturned her murder conviction and freed her from prison.

The Knox family hired a public relations company specializing in crisis management soon after Ms. Knox was arrested in 2007 during her junior year abroad in Perugia, accused along with two men of killing her housemate, Meredith Kercher, during a sexual attack. Volunteers — including parents of Ms. Knox’s former classmates at Seattle Prep — created a Web site that posted wholesome family snapshots of Ms. Knox. It was all part of an effort to counter her portrayal by prosecutors and in the European press as a “she-devil.”

At one point a Seattle judge was admonished for using court stationery to write to Italian officials on her behalf. And Senator Maria Cantwell, a Washington Democrat, championed her case, reaching out to both American and Italian officials.

A tearful Ms. Knox thanked her supporters Tuesday evening at a brief news conference at Sea-Tac Airport. “I’m really overwhelmed right now — I was looking down from the airplane and it seemed like everything wasn’t real,” she said, after her parents reminded her to speak English. “What’s important for me to say is just thank you to everyone who has believed in me, who had defended me, who has supported my family.”

In some respects, her supporters had their work cut out for them. The crime Ms. Knox had been accused and eventually convicted of was lurid, her statements to the police were inconsistent and DNA evidence presented at trial seemed to link her to the brutal killing. Her case — with its nightmarish elements of a young American in Italy caught up in a sexually charged murder case — brought international notoriety to Ms. Knox. The British tabloids took to calling her Foxy Knoxy, adopting a nickname she had used herself on her Facebook and MySpace pages. (Her family said later that the nickname referred to her soccer skills, not her love life.)

But by the time she was freed from an Italian prison on Monday, her public portrayal was very different: Many media accounts in the United States, at least, portrayed Ms. Knox as a nice young woman, a linguistics major at the University of Washington, who had fallen victim to the Italian justice system while on her junior year abroad.

No one can say for sure whether the painstaking and calculated rehabilitation of her image helped sway the Italian courts. Ultimately, it was an official report casting doubt on the DNA evidence in the case that led to her exoneration. But the media frenzy was mentioned by both the prosecution and the defense last month in court.

One of the prosecutors, Giuliano Mignini, complained in court of “the media’s morbid exaltation” of Ms. Knox and her former boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, who had also been convicted of the murder, along with a second man, Rudy Guede. “This lobbying, this media and political circus, this heavy interference, forget all of it!” he told the court, according to The Associated Press. Ms. Knox’s lawyers countered that their client had been “crucified” in the news media.

The appeals court that overturned the convictions of Ms. Knox and Mr. Sollecito upheld Ms. Knox’s conviction on a charge of defamation for accusing the bar owner she had worked for, Diya Lumumba, of committing the murder — leading him to be jailed and then released. (She later said that the police had pressured her to accuse him.)

The murder conviction of the third defendant, Mr. Guede, in a separate trial, was upheld on appeal.

At least one banner welcoming Ms. Knox home was seen Tuesday in her neighborhood — despite a request from her parents not to put up any, out of respect for Ms. Kercher, the victim, whose family was shell-shocked by the turnaround in the case.

Photo

Amanda Knox spoke at a news conference in Seattle.Credit
Michael Hanson for The New York Times

The effort to shape Ms. Knox’s image began soon after her arrest. Her father, Curt Knox, was put in touch with Gogerty Marriott, a Seattle public affairs firm, by a colleague at Macy’s, where he was a vice president at the time. The family wanted help dealing with the barrage of media calls, but at first it was constrained in what it could say.

“It was because, primarily, Amanda’s lawyers in Italy really did not want them doing interviews initially,” said David Marriott, a veteran public affairs man who handled the case. In the beginning, he said, he asked some of Ms. Knox’s college friends to give interviews to testify about her character.

But some family, friends and neighbors were growing concerned that her image was being shaped by British tabloids and Italian prosecutors. A group of volunteers called Friends of Amanda formed, and a few months later they had put up their Web site to protest her innocence. It countered the lurid portrayal of Ms. Knox with pictures of her in a hat at her 7th birthday party and, more recently, playing with her dog, Ralphy.

“What we saw happening, early on, was this tremendous deluge of negative things being said about her that we knew were flat-out wrong,” said Tom Wright, 58, who helped form the group because his daughter Sara attended school with Ms. Knox.

Michael Heavey, a neighbor of Ms. Knox’s who is a superior court judge in Seattle, said that he spoke about the case to Senator Cantwell, a friend of his. When Ms. Knox was convicted in 2009, Ms. Cantwell issued a statement saying in part, “I have serious questions about the Italian justice system and whether anti-Americanism tainted this trial.”

Judge Heavey was admonished last year for using court staff to type three letters to Italian officials on court stationery about Ms. Knox’s case. An agreement with the state said that he had acknowledged that “his compulsion to right what he perceived as a wrong overcame his better judgment.”

The grass-roots element was important, Mr. Wright said, because the Knox family was not rich — he said that Ms. Knox’s relatives had taken out second mortgages to pay legal fees. While his group and a legal defense fund raised more than $100,000 for the family, he estimated that their expenses would add up to more than $1 million.

But over time, Mr. Marriott said, Ms. Knox’s lawyers gave her family permission to do interviews — which they did assiduously. In an interview with The New York Times in Italy this summer while the appeal decision was pending, Ms. Knox’s mother, Edda Mellas, explained her views. “The media has been a curse, but it means that Amanda hasn’t been forgotten; she’s not rotting away,” Ms. Mellas said. “The day I don’t have to speak to another reporter or do another interview can’t happen soon enough. But if it means helping Amanda, then it’s something I will continue to do.”

Gerald L. Shargel, a lawyer who was not involved with the case but has represented other high-profile clients, said that Ms. Knox’s image had undergone a considerable change since the early days. “Now, this didn’t happen overnight, but her image has been airbrushed over the past several years, and now she is the all-American girl who is presented as some conventional young lady abroad who was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he said.

The media interest was huge, and now networks are gunning for interviews. Bookers representing several television shows were on the same flight as Ms. Knox on Tuesday, two network executives said. And some media analysts predict that the next step may be selling a book, which would help defray the legal fees.

“Her story has all the makings of a top-selling book and a made-for-TV movie,” said Lee Kamlet, dean of the school of communications at Quinnipiac University and a former ABC News executive.

Brian Stelter contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on October 5, 2011, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Court Fight, and Tireless Battle Over an Image. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe